At present, inquiries are performed either by mailing a questionnaire and receiving replies or via an interactive interview (e.g. by telephone or face to face). Handling and analyzing the replies manually takes up an unreasonable amount of labor resources and/or time.
The international patent proceeding WO98/09451 has presented a Gallup poll method based on text message inquiries. In this method the inquiry is sent in the form of an SMS message essentially simultaneously to the communication stations of two separate recipients via a service center that utilizes wireless data transfer. Then the recipients enter their replies into the inquiry message and send a reply message in the form of an SMS message back to the data system of the sender, in which it is processed in a predetermined way.